I’ve been exploring using Scribus, a free desktop publishing alternative to Adobe’s InDesign. Previous Take On Rules Portable Document Formats (PDFs 📖) have been crafted using iBooks Author, but I wanted to try something different.
So I began work on a Dungeon World Campaign Playbook – a printable, ready to saddle stitch booklet. To create your own, make sure you can do 2-sided printing. For my cover page, I grabbed some super heavy paper stock.
Considerations
As I see it, there are five prime real estate pages:
- Front Cover
- Inner front cover and first page
- The middle of the book, where the saddle stitching occurs
- Inner back cover and last page
- Back Cover
Another thing that I considered is that the inner pages of a saddle stitched book can easily be removed without adversely affecting the book. In the current iteration, I have Fronts occupying this position, but you could just as easily add blank sheets of paper in the middle.